Fledgling British Modernists

By

Karen Wilkin

Aug. 7, 2013 4:28 p.m. ET

London

The Dulwich Picture Gallery, opened in 1817, is the oldest public art gallery in England, notable for its architecture by John Soane and its quirky collection of old masters. Both the blocky, symmetrical building, with its innovative skylights and unlikely attached mausoleum for its three founders, and the impressive Poussins, Rembrandts, Rubenses and other distinguished works reward the trip to South London. Now there is yet another reason to visit. "Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908-1922" surveys the formative years of six of Britain's best-known 20th-century artists, from when they were hopeful students at the Slade School of Art in London to the wake World War I. (The show's title comes from a description of this constellation of talent by their drawing teacher, the exacting—and conservative— Henry Tonks.)

ENLARGE

'In the Hold' (c. 1913-14) by David Bomberg.
Tate London

A Crisis of Brilliance

Dulwich Picture Gallery

Through Sept. 22

Although their reputations have fluctuated, the painters in "A Crisis of Brilliance"—Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Carrington (she jettisoned her much-disliked first name, Dora) and Daniel Bomberg—are today all recognized as significant figures in the evolution of British modernism. Nash became a leading British Surrealist. Nevinson was an acclaimed chronicler of World War I and close to the Italian Futurists and British Vorticists. Spencer is an aesthetic ancestor of such raunchy British figure painters as Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Paula Rego. Carrington and Gertler were associated with the Bloomsbury Group that included Virginia Woolf; her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell; and the critic Roger Fry. Bomberg, a stubborn individual, taught such students as Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.

For anyone who knows the developed work of these artists, the show provides an interesting back story—with a caveat. The art world's infatuation with unformed recent art-school graduates notwithstanding, the work of unfledged artists is often more compelling for its promise than for its achievement, and the protagonists of "A Crisis of Brilliance" are very young indeed. Anyone expecting masterpieces will be disappointed.

The show begins with work made during the sextet's first years at the Slade (or just before), when they were all about 20 at most. Confusingly, though, the first thing we see, outside the exhibition entrance, is one of Bomberg's largest, most adventurous pictures, "In the Hold" (c. 1913-14), painted when he was 22 or 23 and had just left the Slade. It's a fierce, abstract, brilliantly colored riff on dock workers, based on a grid so aggressively subdivided into smaller planes that the generating subject disappears. Nothing that follows approaches this level of audacity. Instead, we encounter acutely sensitive, uncompromisingly naturalistic drawings, some done in Tonks's life classes: Gertler's vigorously stroked portrait of Carrington; an exquisitely drawn, conspicuously pretty head of Gertler, once thought a self-portrait but newly identified as by Carrington; Carrington's delicate rendering of her own puppyish features; Spencer's boyish, truculent self-portrait in red chalk.

None of these young hopefuls, most about a decade younger than Picasso or Braque, seems, at first, to have been interested in (or aware of) modernism. But in 1910 and 1912, during their time at the Slade, an important show of Italian Futurism and the celebrated Grafton Galleries exhibitions of French Post-Impressionism, organized by Roger Fry, were held in London. Not long after that, flickers of Cézannian simplifications and Futurist fragmentation began to appear in Bomberg's, Nevinson's and Nash's work, even though the wall texts' quoted responses to such experiments make it clear that vanguard exploration was not encouraged in England at the time. (Tonks told Slade students that while he couldn't forbid them to visit the Grafton Galleries, he strongly urged them not to.)

Nevinson, more than any of the others, came to embrace every modernist suggestion he encountered, while Gertler and Carrington remained largely wedded to Renaissance-inspired fidelity to appearances; Piero della Francesca, not Picasso, was their hero. Spencer seems to have been born fully formed as an inventor of his characteristic, crowded narratives—cranky compositions, modern in subject and schematic in execution, with overtones of illustration.

All six were beginning to find individual directions when World War I disrupted everything. Several enlisted. Nevinson, an official war artist, developed a muscular, dramatic, much-admired style for such images as wounded soldiers awaiting treatment and the aftermath of bombardments. Gertler, a conscientious objector who was rejected from military service anyway because of poor health, produced a large allegorical, expressionist antiwar painting (represented here only by preparatory drawings) that was greeted with hostile derision. Carrington seems to have ignored the war, painting meticulous portraits such as her best-known work, a close-up profile of her beloved Lytton Strachey, reading, all bushy beard and long, thin fingers.

"A Crisis of Brilliance" ends with the aftermath of World War I, before most of the six artists turned 30. Among the standouts in this section is Spencer's rarely seen, chalky "Unveiling Cookham War Memorial" (1922), an updated, vernacular version of a 17th-century "philosophical" painting—one that must be "read" for its sharp characterizations and diverse individual actions. Equally noteworthy (and large) is Bomberg's 1918-1919 study for a commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund. In contrast to the prismatic abstraction at the entrance to the show, this loose, animated painting plays agile figures against schematic architecture, fluidly brushed in high key hues. Rejected as "a futurist abortion," Bomberg's idiosyncratic composition today looks both prescient and current. It makes us wonder what happened next. But that's another exhibition.

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